Canadians seek to understand motive

Authorities and ordinary Canadians sifted through confounding shards of a gunman’s life seeking to understand what motivated the man to storm the nation’s seat of power.

The emerging portrait of Michael Zehaf-Bibeau is a fragmented one: a misfit who went more than five years without seeing his mother; a crack cocaine user who once told a psychological evaluator he wanted to go to jail to beat his addiction; a committed Muslim who said he wanted to become a better man, but in recent weeks seemed to come unglued; and a homeless shelter resident who talked about wanting to go to Libya or Syria and became upset when he couldn’t get a passport.

A day after the 32-year-old Canadian launched what Prime Minister Stephen Harper called a terrorist attack, a top police official said on Thursday that Zehaf-Bibeau, whose father was from Libya, may have lashed out in frustration over delays in getting his passport.

The deadly attack was the second on Canadian soldiers in three days, forcing the country to confront the danger of radicalised citizens in its midst and exposing weak spots in security.

It has raised fears that Canada is suffering reprisals perhaps so-called lone-wolf attacks for joining the U.S-led air campaign against Islamic State extremists in Iraq and Syria.

In a brief and tear-filled telephone interview with the

AP , Bibeau’s mother Susan said she was crying for the victims of the shooting rampage, not her son. “Can you ever explain something like this?” said Susan, who has homes in Montreal and Ottawa. “We are sorry.”